Light Painting With a Raspberry Pi LED Robot

Did you know that you can make light paintings with a long exposure camera? Light painting is a photographic technique in which exposures are made by moving a hand-held light source while taking a long exposure photograph. We take this a step further by finely controlling the light source's movement with a stepper motor driven rover. The results are stunning. The project consists of a Raspberry Pi 3, two stepper motors, and a Neopixel LED matrix. It can easily be recreated with a 3D printer and all of the code is provided.

You will need the following materials for this project:

2× Nema-17 200 steps/rev Stepper Motors https://www.adafruit.com/products/324

2× Stepper Motor Drivers https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-tb6612-h-bridge-dc-stepper-motor-driver-breakout

1× Raspberry Pi 3 https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-3-model-b/

1× Neopixel 8x8 LED Matrix https://www.adafruit.com/product/1487

1× Female Jumper Wires https://www.adafruit.com/products/794

1× Cell Phone Charging Battery https://www.amazon.com/Anker-PowerCore-Ultra-Compact-High-speed-Technology/dp/B0194WDVHI/ref=pd_cp_107_4?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B0194WDVHI&pd_rd_r=6KNMRQXWWWW73HPVV7E6&pd_rd_w=XTSLf&pd_rd_wg=eT0DL&psc=1&refRID=6KNMRQXWWWW73HPVV7E6

1× 12v Step Up Chip https://www.amazon.com/Qunqi-XL6009-Adapter-Booster-Step-up/dp/B01E4YERBU/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1489673917&sr=8-6&keywords=5v+to+12v+step+up+chip

2× Might Need a Couple USB Splitters https://www.amazon.com/Cute-USB-2-Port-Splitter-Black/dp/B00FJG5T4W/ref=sr_1_11?ie=UTF8&qid=1489673957&sr=8-11&keywords=1+to+3+usb+splitter

We created this step-by-step video about how we built the robot.

(More details about 3d printable parts and the code we used are posted in the next step)

Some resources for this project are provided below:

Find all the 3d printable parts for this project on our Hackaday.io page: https://hackaday.io/project/20365-light-photograp...

All the code can be found on Github: https://github.com/HackerHouseYT/Light-Rover

Raspberry Pi Neopixel library: https://github.com/HackerHouseYT/Light-Rover

Thanks for viewing our instructable!
Aaron @ Hacker House